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Red Hat aims for public cloud domination

Chief executive Jim Whitehurst outlined the firm's cloud strategy at a
roundtable event in London

Jim Whitehurst: Only Red Hat and Microsoft have all the technology to deliver public clouds

Red Hat is possibly the most successful open source company in the world, and
the firm believes that the open source development process makes it best placed
to drive enterprise adoption of public cloud computing, ahead of rivals such as
Microsoft or VMware.

At a roundtable event in London, Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst
outlined the company's approach to cloud computing, and the way IT services are
heading in the near future.

Whitehurst identified three basic trends in today's IT: cloud computing; flat
budgets; and online services such as those from Google driving expectations for
enterprise IT projects.

"For every chief information officer of any major company in the world today
Google is your competitor, at least in terms of the expectations your users have
of what you can deliver," he said, explaining that tools such as Google Mail
provide a better collaboration experience than many enterprise-grade products.

"Expectations have gone through the roof in terms of what people expect IT to
be able to deliver, not only the richness of the content and the speed at which
they can be delivered, but the cost because Google is free."

Perhaps not surprisingly, Whitehurst sees open source development as the
answer to this problem because of its ability to respond rapidly and because
open source projects tend to add features via small iterative changes instead of
lengthy development cycles.

"We're seeing an explosion in demand for our application infrastructure
software, JBoss, JBoss developer studio and all the other components that allow
an enterprise to build an application very rapidly and get them running in a
production environment," he said. Budgets are also driving organisations to open
source, he added.

As for cloud computing, Whitehurst admitted that he initially dismissed it as
a fad, but now believes that the economic arguments are compelling for
re-centralising IT back to the datacentre.

"Going from two per cent utilisation of a server to 90 per cent has massive
benefits, as does keeping data centralised in this world of security and privacy
concerns, keeping functionality close-in, and doing away with the sprawl of PCs
that costs more in support costs than the hardware does," he explained.

Red Hat's role in developing the cloud is to work with customers to make sure
that they have choices at every level of the stack, the firm said, otherwise
organisations risk getting locked to a single architecture once more.

"If you can't move your data out from the stack, cloud computing will become
the mother of all lock-ins and one of the most expensive things the enterprise
ever does," Whitehurst warned.